Archive for the ‘Lead Nurturing’ Category

[Webinar Review] How Much Marketing Do You Need?

Tuesday, March 26th, 2013

On March 20th, Sales Engine kicked off its three-part webinar series on revenue growth planning. Mike Vannoy, COO, presented part one, How Much Marketing Do You Need?

The webinar begins by taking a look at buyer behavior and the way buyers engage sales and marketing organizations. As marketing extends further into the purchasing process, the alignment to buyers’ needs will shift. Later in the presentation, Mike makes the point that the purchasing process is really a series of integrated touches between sales and marketing—almost a tag team effort. In order to better align to buyers needs, marketing and sales leaders need to consider the answers to the following questions:

How Much Should You Spend on Marketing?

To determine the amount of money organizations should spend on marketing, they must first calculate the cost of customer acquisition (CAC) and factor in the customer lifetime value (CLV). This will show the return yielded from sales and marketing efforts to acquire a single customer. However, the months to recover from customer acquisition costs must also be taken into account.

How Many Leads Does Your Sales Team Need?

First, organizations should start with a simple, funnel conversion model based on revenue goals. It is important to account for nurturing and remarketing as Mike points out, “80% of all marketing leads that sales disqualifies, go on to make a buying decision within a year.” If these disqualified leads can be recaptured, there are a lot of potential sales to be won. Finally, the numbers should be adjusted to account for velocity as new leads are typically not converted into wins within the same month.

How Big Should Your Database Be?

To begin, sales and marketing leaders should calculate the amount of suspects required based on the number Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) needed each month. Then, decay and atrophy need to be factored out. According to NetProspex, a database decays by 2% each month. Finally, organization must again account for velocity and consider options for database maintenance and growth.

Mike did a great job of walking attendees through the numbers and calculations step by step. Furthermore, he created a Revenue Growth Marketing Calculator to help sales and marketing leaders run the numbers specific to their organization and answer the above questions with ease. For additional direction on these questions and how to use the Revenue Growth Marketing Calculator, visit the recording of our webinar, Revenue Planning (Part One): How Much Marketing Do You Need?

 

ALSO IN THE SERIES:

Part Two: Finding the Optimal Marketing Mix

Thursday, April 18th at 1pm EST— Once you have determined the amount of marketing, discover the precise combination of email, PPC, SEO, social, etc. you need to meet your revenue goals. Stacey Steiger, VP of Marketing and Product Management, will answer the questions:

  • What are the most effective digital marketing channels?
  • What is the right marketing mix?
  • How should I allocate spend on each channel?

For more information, visit Revenue Planning (Part Two): Finding the Optimal Marketing Mix

Part Three: Critical Resources for Growth

Thursday, May 23rd at 1pm EST—With a firm grasp on your revenue growth plan, learn how to efficiently support that plan with the appropriate skills and resources. Paul Rafferty, CEO, will answer the questions:

  • What skills are required to execute?
  • How should I organize my Sales & Marketing structure?
  • How do I integrate people, process & technology?

For more information, visit Revenue Planning (Part Three): Critical Resources for Growth

Chelsea Wertheimer

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When Best Practices Don’t Yield Optimal Results: Channel Marketing Challenges

Friday, March 8th, 2013

Business ChartsRecently we've been talking a lot about the importance of well-defined and documented processes to support demand generation. If you've been following, we've shared the findings of a recent Forrester report on lead-to-revenue management and carried those concepts forward in our February webinar. A big takeaway from both the report and the presentation is that organizations need to reconsider the funnel metaphor as it applies to the revenue growth process.

Putting more in at the top of the funnel does not necessarily lead to increased revenue. Marketers are finding that the buyer-controlled sales journey does not follow a direct and predictable path and that the key to growth is lead-to-revenue management: identifying one optimized process and then repeating that process for every prospective buyer. What does that have to do with channels specifically? Well, this is where we found an interesting development.

In a recent Forrester report, B2B Marketing Tactics And Results: Channel Oriented Versus Direct, analyst Tim Harmon compared the approach of companies that market to channels with the approach of companies operating in a direct marketing model. Companies that market through channels give up some control over the ultimate processes that direct their marketing. Furthermore, they can be at a disadvantage as their channel partners often have other products and services to market, which may consume a greater share of the channel’s resources.

In its report, Forrester found that channel GTM (go-to-market) marketers were more likely than direct marketers to have defined and documented processes in nearly every category of demand generation activity. For example, channel-oriented marketers were 14 percentage points above direct-oriented marketers in campaign planning and 17 percentage points higher in lead scoring. Channel GTM marketers were also more comprehensive in their efforts to measure marketing performance, consistently using a broader range of metrics when evaluating the health of their programs. Channel-oriented decision makers were more likely to use metrics in effectiveness, efficiency, value, and velocity.

Given this level of discipline and what we already know about the results mature marketing organizations are achieving through effective lead-to-revenue management processes, we expected the second half of the report to reveal that channel GTM companies enjoy higher levels of lead conversion and a greater percentage of closed leads.

Instead, data presented in the report indicates the opposite. Direct marketing organizations surpass channels in every key benchmark of lead conversion. They enjoy a greater percentage of conversion starting with the conversion of website visitors to leads and carrying through the conversion of inbound leads to marketing qualified leads, to sales qualified leads, to appointments, to opportunities, and to closed deals. Most notably, direct-oriented marketers outperformed channel-oriented marketers in sales-qualified leads by 10 percentage points, sales accepted leads by 14 percentage points, and sales opportunities by 9 percentage points.

How are companies that follow the best practices required to convert more leads to revenue failing to achieve at the same levels as less disciplined marketers? For channel GTM marketers, the lack of control at the ultimate level of engagement with the buyer presents a critical challenge. Getting process rigor to filter down through affiliate networks is tough. But, if your organization is dependent on channels to take your solution to market, there are ways to bring best practices to your channel partners.

Tom Harmon at Forrester provides a few recommendations that make sense to us.

  • Provide a through-partner marketing automation tool to allow for campaign collaboration and shared dashboards
  • Integrate the corporate marketing system, the partner portal and partner relationship management system to improve governance, and
  • Work to increase the frequency and quality of communication with channel partners through more robust portals and the use of social media communication tools

For more information on the recommendations above and additional best practices, visit our page on empowering your channel partners.

Alexis Borucke

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[Webinar] The Funnel is Not a Process: Understanding Lead-to-Revenue Management

Wednesday, February 27th, 2013

Revenue GrowthOur recent presentation, The Funnel is Not a Process: Understanding Lead-to-Revenue Management was one of our most successful webinars in Sales Engine history. Minus some small technical difficulties one often sees with these live events, we had record attendance and probably our most engaged audience yet (based upon the number of questions we received).

Lori Wizdo, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, and Paul Rafferty, CEO at Sales Engine, addressed one of the biggest concerns facing almost all executives and company leaders out there: marketing’s impact on the bottom line.

Lori began with an in depth look at the lead-to-revenue process required to improve marketing efficiency which in turn increases revenue growth and validates marketing’s impact on that growth. She showed the audience the building blocks required to use a “results chain model” and move a prospect from a lead all the way to revenue in a successful and repeatable process. To close, Lori shared some insights from her research at Forrester on the top tactics being used most effectively at each stage of the lead nurturing cycle. Paul took over with his thoughts on and experience with the evolving roles of sales and marketing. He focused his attention on the skill sets and resources required to implement and drive a lead-to-revenue process effectively. The webinar concluded with a thorough Q&A session and two resources to download: 1) The November 2012 Forrest Research Inc. Report: Pinpoint the Actions and Outcomes that Elevate Leads to Revenue  and 2) the Sales Engine Integrated Marketing Infographic that details what we do and how we do it.

View the recorded webinar- The Funnel is Not a Process: Understanding Lead-to-Revenue Management

**Author’s Note:  See if you can spot the IM’s I sent to Alexis (our slide operator) in the middle of the webinar. Live events are always full of surprises!

Chelsea Wertheimer

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